Returning from seeing the devastation near his hometown of Biloxi, Mississippi, Russell Moore reflects on the failures of Christians to give due consideration to environmental protection:
For too long, we evangelical Christians have maintained an uneasy ecological conscience. I include myself in this indictment.
We’ve had an inadequate view of human sin.
Because we believe in free markets, we’ve acted as though this means we should trust corporations to protect the natural resources and habitats. But a laissez-faire view of government regulation of corporations is akin to the youth minister who lets the teenage girl and boy sleep in the same sleeping bag at church camp because he “believes in young people.”
The Scripture gives us a vision of human sin that means there ought to be limits to every claim to sovereignty, whether from church, state, business or labor. A commitment to the free market doesn’t mean unfettered license any more than a commitment to free speech means hardcore pornography ought to be broadcast in prime-time by your local network television affiliate.
Caesar’s sword is there, by God’s authority, to restrain those who would harm others (Rom. 13). When government fails or refuses to protect its own people, whether from nuclear attack or from toxic waste spewing into our life-giving waters, the government has failed.
We’ve seen the issue of so-called “environmental protection” as someone else’s issue.
June 2nd, 2010 | 12:24 pm
Laissez-faire environmental policies are not comparable to naive views on chastity. Accidental disasters — no matter how vivid — are not similar to an adolescent’s succumbing to sexual temptation.
To be laissez-faire is not to advocate unlimited claims to sovereignty from “state, business or labor.” It means to be hands-off when we are greatly tempted to meddle.
We are most tempted to meddle in the face of strong emotional incentives that have little to do with the causes of dysfunction. Biloxi is covered! Look at that underwater plume! Somebody do something! Dr. Moore sees damage and suffering, and he seeks a human scapegoat: us, through lax policies that allowed such evil to be possible. This is not a sophisticated understanding of economics, regulation, or politics (or Christian civic duty, for that matter). While it is true that our freely maneuvering, petroleum-based economy is indirectly responsible for the suffering of Biloxi, to aim one’s wrath against indirect agents of the catastrophe is inappropriate at best, idolatry at worst.
Mob-generated scapegoating based on momentary passions is an easy temptation, and for a Christian, pagan idolatry is a significant danger in this case.
Mankind has been given dominion over the earth. We are her stewards. We are not her disciples or supplicants. Accidents occur in the course of our stewardship. What is the plausible accusation to adjudicate here? BP’s inappropriately extreme pursuit of profit led to culpability through cutting corners on catastrophe prevention? Our use of gasoline driving to the corner market is in some partial way connected to the Biloxi ordeal? Yes, yes, in all sin be suspicious of yourself, seek your own responsibility first. But scrupulosity is a disorder too, and human-created enormities are occasions for us to possibly over-correct and cause unseen damage away from the pain we so singularly labor to dispel in the moment.
An evangelical Christian should be sensitive to insidious lure of divided loyalties. Christ’s third temptation is illustrative. We don’t worship Mammon on purpose. There’s always a good reason!
Let seven times seventy oil spills wash over Biloxi and drown out its life before we falsely condemn a single soul for an earthly transgression, attribute responsibility wrongly, or kneel before the prerogatives of a pretender to the Throne.
It is salutary to see religious conservatives take an approach to topical controversies that challenges the expected party line. It helps us rethink and thereby strengthen our orthodoxy. But there are deep and abiding reasons Christians are “laissez-faire” with regard to what belongs to Caesar, and indeed, all the evanescent things residing in the kingdom of this world.
June 2nd, 2010 | 3:32 pm
One notes that “clean-up” efforts after oil spills have had worse effects than the spills without cleanup.
June 2nd, 2010 | 7:36 pm
I agree with King and disagree with the Rev. Dr. Moore’s positions. If the evangelical Christian community has failed to use its political clout on anything significant in today’s America the best candidate I see is that we rolled-over and by our silence gave “green” progressives too much influence in modern technology and industrial policies. Mushy thinking on “stewardship” kept us from speaking out while they systematically stripped our industrial base – you know, the folks who used to provide most of our jobs, of resources and locations from which to operate.
We drove the petroleum industry from our land, where disasters are fairly easily controlled, into environments where every movement must be preplanned and programmed from afar. Of course an accident was going to occur.
BP may have been criminally negligent, or worse. But right now we don’t know that, yet.
I weep for Biloxi, too, but its not the time to get all emotional and establish even worse policies than we now have. Let’s get the facts, make reasoned decisions, and be better stewards. God gave us the earth and all that is in it. That includes the oil shale and coal deposits we won’t use in order to be politically correct, and the vast oil reserves in a huge frozen tundra field in Alaska. If we have any shame, it should be for not using those low-hanging gifts before we went searching a mile deep in the ocean.
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